cdawson

Tuesday, November 1, 2016

Hey! What’s up? I know we just saw each other yesterday and
I’ll probably see you later today too with Ginger and Lotti, but I find myself
awake at 5:30 in the morning and you’re on my mind.

Weird, right? That I would be thinking about a trail while
having my morning coffee and working on the crossword puzzle? Yet…

I feel like I need to tell you something. We’ve known each other
for, what, four years now? I can still remember the first time I saw you. I was
living way out at the far end of Snyder Hill Road and I was tired of always
having to run on hills. I was just looking for a flat place to run. I didn’t
intend to fall in love.

But that is exactly what happened. I’m sorry to surprise you
like this, using the word “love” and all, but I can’t hide my feelings any
longer. Cayuga Waterfront Trail, I love you.

I’ve never felt this way about a trail before. If it’s a
shock to you, well, it caught me by surprise too. I’m not really sure what to
do with this feeling. I mean, I know it’s crazy to love a trail. I know you
can’t return the feeling. You’re a trail for crisesakes--you can’t be
exclusive.

And I know in my heart of hearts I don’t really want to keep
you just to myself. I mean, part of what makes you so great is how open and
accepting you are of everyone. Bikers, runners, dog walkers, skateboarders,
people in wheelchairs, racewalkers, families with kids on trikes---you’re there
for everyone and I wouldn’t have you change.

Now that I’ve spilled the beans I feel a little
self-conscious. But I’ve also now got nothing to lose. I hope you’re still
reading this and haven’t tossed it to the trash. I was telling a friend about
you the other day—I talk about you A LOT—and he wanted to know what was so
great about you. So I started to tell him about how you change so much from
season to season and day to day and even hour to hour. But at the same time you
are always there for me.

And I told him about how being close to water makes me feel
better, no matter what. Even if I was already feeling good to start with.

But then I stopped talking and took him for a run through
Cass Park and over the foot bridge and past the boathouses and the Farmer’s
Market and over to Stewart Park and then back. He saw what I meant. We must
have seen 40 people while we were walking and all of them were happy just to be
near you.

I love the way you make me feel, but I can’t keep that just
to myself.It’s clear you make other
people feel that same way.Cayuga
Waterfront Trail, I just want to thank you for being you and to let you know I
love you.

Friday, September 23, 2016

I am on my way to Seattle, where I will rent a car and drive
to Bellingham, WA to run the Bellingham Bay Half Marathon. The registration was
a Christmas gift from Erica. This is the third race she has gotten me for
Christmas. The others were in two of the most beautiful places in the American
West. One was Valley of Fire State Park in Nevada and the other was Bryce
Canyon, Utah. Both were stunning.

I am a bit superstitious about some things, so I am almost
afraid to start writing about this weekend’s race before I have run it.I have always been superstitious in this
particular way—I fear that assuming a particular thing will happen--and then
stating that assumption out loud--somehow calls the Universe’s attention to my
stupid human hubris and makes it far more likely that the Universe will take
pains to prove me wrong.

When I was 21 and moved to Yemen I found an entire nation
that had my same superstition. Only, theirs was part of their religion and came
out in the phrase in sha’allah. I was teaching English in Yemen and if I said
to my students “You will have a test next Tuesday” they would quietly append
the words “in sha’allah.”

If I said to my landlord Mohammed “I will live here in your
apartment next year, too” he would say “in
sha’allah.”

It means “if Allah wills” and it is meant as a reminder that
everything is in the hands of someone or something else. To state something
with certainty is seen as sacrilege.

Given all of this, I feel compelled to qualify the things I
will write here about this weekend’s race. Indulge me?

So, IF my plane makes it to Seattle on time and IF my rental
car gets me safely to Bellingham, and IF I actually complete the race Sunday
morning, that will make 25 states I will have run a half marathon in. It will
mean I am halfway to my goal of running a half marathon in all 50 states.

You know what?This
already feels like I am tempting fate. I was about to write a whole bunch more
about some of my favorite memories from some of the past races and about some
of the things running has taught me. But I just can’t do it.

IF all goes well, I will write more on Sunday as I take the
red-eye home, in sha’allah.

Monday, August 15, 2016

Donald Trump has recently brought up the threat of electoral fraud
leading to his defeat in November’s election. His repeated comments are
interpreted by many in the fact-based world in several ways:

He is trying to scare his supporters into
turning out on Election Day to cast their votes for him.

He knows he will lose and he is making excuses
in advance.

He is sending a signal to his followers that
they should refuse to accept the results of November’s vote and instead
participate in some sort of revolt.

I think there is a likelier true fourth explanation: he
believes what he is saying.

Donald Trump is not a person who has spent much time
studying the deeper currents of electoral politics in the United States. He has
a notoriously short attention span and shockingly thin skin. If the current
polls are an accurate reflection of voter preference, it is an existential
threat to Donald Trump’s dreadfully under-developed self. To keep his
hyper-exaggerated ego inflated, Trump must dismiss the polls as wrong or
crooked.

The same is true for the vote totals in November. If he
losses in November, it can only mean one thing---the totals are fraudulent and
the Presidency has been stolen.

To people out here in Factland, the idea of massive
electoral fraud at a national scale is unsupported by ANY evidence.

But to Donald Trump the idea that he might not be liked by
voters is equally unsupported by ANY evidence.

Three or four or five times a week he is the star attraction
at rallies with thousands of enraptured supporters who cheer his every word. It
is clear to him that The People love him. What he does not get is that people love him, but The People do not.
He believes only what he sees and feels rather than what is happening away from
his tiny, tightly controlled universe.

He is just like Kim Jong-un in that over time he has
surrounded himself only with people who tell him how beloved he is, how great,
how amazing, how revolutionary, how huge! Other voices with other opinions have
a hard time making their way in. When an occasional alternative view makes it
to Mr. Trump’s ears, he immediately and reflexively dismisses the source as
somehow hateful or biased.

He believes his own good press and dismisses everything else
as wrong. Of course he would say that
electoral fraud would be the only way he could lose in November. At his center,
Donald Trump is a small person who has never learned to think or feel outside
of his own under-developed intellect and over-indulged id.

Wednesday, June 8, 2016

I have a friend who thinks that one of the main criteria of
intelligence is knowing lots of facts. This same friend believes that another
defining characteristic of intelligence is speed. This friend thinks that I am
somewhat smart. I read a lot (and widely) so there are a lot of facts stored
away in my head. I also have fairly fast recall, though not as fast as it was when
I was younger.

On the surface, my friend’s picture of intelligence makes
sense. It is certainly one that correlates highly with good grades in school.
If possessed in sufficient quantities, factual knowledge and ready access to
those facts make standardized tests relatively easy.

I like taking tests. Especially standardized tests. I always
have. I find them pretty easy and I LOVE the added element of a severe time
limit. I do well under pressure and usually score pretty high. As a 50-year
old, I have very few opportunities in my life to take standardized tests any
more. So instead I get my ego stroked by playing trivia games and doing timed
crossword puzzles on the New York Times’ website. I am not proud to admit that
I do these things, because I know that deep down they really do serve just one
purpose—to make me feel good about myself.

As a product of schools that graded based on timed recall of
facts, I used to believe that intelligence was a thing you could measure in
just exactly that way—gauge how many facts a person knew and how quickly they
could recall them. But once I became a teacher, I saw how utterly wrong, and
even destructive, this view of intelligence is for so many kids.

If I develop a pain in my abdomen that won’t go away, that
seems to move around a bit, that doesn’t respond to antacids, that wakes me up
in the night, and seems worse after I eat dairy products, eventually I will go
to a doctor. And once I describe my symptoms to the doctor, if she is flummoxed
and no obvious diagnosis comes to her right away the LAST thing I want her to
do is to take a guess.

If my car starts to run a little rough, (especially in the
rain), and it makes a knocking sound when it idles below 1500 RPMs, and it has
a bit of trouble accelerating up hills, I will take it to a mechanic. If, after
hearing the list of symptoms, the mechanic cannot say exactly what is wrong I
do not want her to just replace the fuel injectors.

In both cases I want the expert to do some digging. I want
them to research my symptoms and ask follow up questions and to take it out for
a test drive—(the car, not my abdomen). I want them to slowly and methodically
isolate the problem and then help me fix it.

The factors that make a doctor or an auto mechanic good are
careful listening, a deep pool of basic knowledge and experience with bodies
and cars, a network of colleagues to consult with, excellent research skills,
an ability to focus, an ability to think critically, and a reservoir of
patience.

These are the very same skills we should be developing in
students. Notice that high among these skills is a deep pool of basic
knowledge. We should absolutely be teaching facts. Memorizing multiplication
tables, state capitals, planets, the periodic table, countries of the world,
and all sorts of other facts is a good thing and should not be tossed aside in
favor of teaching critical thinking. But
this sort of list-based learning should be seen for what it is—a necessary
preliminary step and NOT the true measure of intelligence.

I have been thinking a lot about timed tests recently. My
daughter is a sophomore in high school and she has tests all the time. Most of
the tests are given in a 45-minute class period with no time later to finish
what you did not get to or to check over your work. Is this really a good way
to test what people know? If you really want to find out what students know,
wouldn’t you give them enough time to let them show you what they know rather
than increasing their anxiety and making it more likely they will make
mistakes?

Seems pretty basic, doesn’t it? Yet timed tests are still
the most common way teachers and states evaluate what students have learned. As
someone with many years of classroom teaching experience, I get it. Schools are
organizations built on structure and predictability.

Put bluntly, schools need to move hundreds or even thousands
of kids through their day with maximum predictability and minimum friction. In
most high schools, the master schedule is driven by the size of the
cafeteria—how many kids can eat lunch 4th period? 5th
period? 6th period? If school systems really valued student learning
as the top priority, class schedules would look very different, as would tests.

When I go to the doctor or the mechanic I do not give them a
43 minute time limit to correctly diagnose the problem. Then why do we add the
unnecessary element of time to our evaluations of what kids have learned?

If I am in a car crash and trapped behind the wheel with a
collapsed lung, I want the rescue crew to get me out of there as fast as
possible. But reading a passage and answering comprehension questions is not a
life and death situation. Why do we treat it like it is? Working through a
complex geometry problem involving the quadratic equation quickly will never
save someone’s life—so why do teachers and schools continue to use timed tests
to find out what kids know?

It is a well-known truism among teachers that what you test
on should reflect what you value. In a twisted way, our utter over-reliance on
timed tests bears this out. As a society we value speed and busy-ness. We do
not seem to value quiet reflection or the student who says “let me think my way
through this.”

I understand that all of this is really just a reflection of
the deeper problem of education in America. We still don’t agree on what
schools are for. Are they a great democratizing place where our kids go and all
of them learn facts, but also learn how to find, process, consolidate,
evaluate, and synthesize information in order to be citizens who can
participate fully in our democracy? Or are they the place we send kids to train
them for whatever entry-level jobs will demand of them? Do we want our schools
to help our kids come to their own well-founded, well-considered conclusions or
do we want them to be able to produce a lot of factual information quickly?

Monday, June 6, 2016

There are some Republicans who believe that John McCain and
Mitt Romney lost to Barack Obama because they were not conservative enough.
This group of GOP voters pinned all of their hopes on Ted Cruz this time
around. Without harping on Cruz or his fans, let me just say that we all saw
how that turned out.

I disagree strongly with the above-mentioned conservatives’
analysis of the elections of 2008 and 2012. McCain and Romney did not lose
because they were not conservative enough. McCain lost because he showed
godawful judgment in wanting to place Sarah Palin one old-man-heartbeat away
from the nuclear launch codes. He also lost because Americans were sick and
tired of George Bush and wanted a change. Mitt Romney lost because he was
simply not likable, though he could never get himself to this conclusion.

Heading into this year’s long primary season I was a bit
concerned. You see, I am a latte-drinking, quinoa eating, NPR listening, NY
Times reading, climate change believing liberal and I know how rarely a
two-term president is followed by someone from the same party. I figured the
Democrats would nominate Hillary Clinton and I knew she had very high
negatives.

I saw the Republicans had a few candidates who were somewhat
likeable. They had Jeb Bush. They had Marco Rubio. They had John Kasich. It
seemed like even odds to me that the Republicans would win the White House. It
was certainly within their grasp.

GOP primary voters had just one job to do and the Presidency
of the United States of America could be theirs. All they had to do was
nominate someone less unlikeable than Hillary Clinton. That's it. That is all they had to do. One thing. One job…and they chose
Donald Trump.

Welcome

Thanks for coming here to check out my occasional postings. Originally, this was a place to share some of the articles I have written for the Ithaca Child parent newspaper from Tompkins County in Upstate New York. It has morphed into a catchall receptacle for my random thoughts and jottings. I used to just file them away on my computer's hard drive, but now I polish them (ever-so-slightly) and put them online. If you read one that makes you want to respond with a comment, please do so. The Internet can feel like a great big void. Comments about what I have written would let me know that the void has some inhabitants. Thanks again for coming.